It's safe to say that at least half of the American populace is looking forward to the Decider's last day in office. For some, however, celebration day (01-20-09) can't get here soon enough. That's the crux of the No More Bush tour a?? a traveling happening of sorts dreamed up by Arthur magazine and the Ecstatic Yod Collective a?? a diverse group of fringe bands and artists associated with the Massachusetts record label of the same name.
Noted music journalist and Yod-father Byron Coley leads the loose membership of electronic tweakers, freak-folkers and avant-rockers to the Velvet Lounge tonight for an evening of musical dissent.
Coley, whose opinions of outsider music can be read in the pages of Arthur, Mojo and the Wire, is promoting a new book he has co-authored with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore chronicling the artsy no wave music movement of late-'70s New York.
That the book's release should coincide with a Bush-bashing tour is serendipitous, says Coley. "We're happy to get the book out and happy it's the end of the Bush presidency," he says. While there's no real interconnection between the two, the tour and the book's subject both share a reactionary interjection of sorts.
In the forward to "No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980," scene luminary Lydia Lunch writes: "No Wave was the waste product of ... the failure of the Summer of Love a?| the hell of the Vietnam War, and a desperate need to violently rebel against the complacency of a zombie nation dumbed down by sitcoms and disco."
The music was jagged and experimental and "didn't result in huge players," says Coley. At the time, however, its ranks often rubbed elbows with greatness, including British rocker Brian Eno, who famously enlisted four of the movement's finest outfits to appear on a sampler LP called "No New York"a??the movement's default audio document.
Coley says because few other no wave recordings exist a?? and because few bands have succeeded in transmuting the essence of its sound a?? the measure of the movement's influence is hard to quantify. "People like to think there's a continuum, but I'm not really sure that there is."
As for the No More Bush tour, it's more a state of mind than a movement, but it has a place for those who say "no."
--Johnathan Rickman, Express (Aug. 2008)
